By Kennedy Maize
Shades of Tommy Gold. The U.S. Geological Survey this week said it has concluded that there are vast “technically recoverable” methane hydrate reserves trapped in the Arctic coastal plain that could provide some 85.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, a significant addition to U.S. natural gas reserves.
Gas hydrates, also known as methane clathrates, are an unconventional source of gas, consisting of methane trapped in ice formations at high pressure and low temperatures. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the late Thomas Gold (1920-2004), a Cornell University astrophysicist and well-known scientific maverick, argued that the earth had vast deposits of methane hydrates.
Gold argued that hydrocarbons were the result of forces of physics in the formation of the planet, not the conventional view that oil and gas and coal were the result of the decay of vegetable and animal sources buried by fossilization. His term for the origin of hydrocarbons was “abiogenic.”
Later, Gold argued in his 1998 book The Deep Hot Biosphere that petroleum and coal were the result of the abiogenic methane and deep-sea bacterial action to turn gas into liquids and solids.
Gold predicted – when I interviewed him twenty years ago for The Energy Daily – that vast, undiscovered natural gas resources were locked in ice in the Arctic and in deep sea beds. He said natural gas was essentially an inexhaustible resource, a product of the creation of the planet. Methane – one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms (CH4) – he argued, is a simple molecule, easily formed from the forces that created the earth and likely one of the most common chemicals surviving the earth’s birth.
Gold, despite a reputation as an original thinker and possessing impeccable academic credentials, was greeted with scorn by conventional geologists. They said he was a crank. Methane hydrates, they said, were an interesting anomaly, but could never constitute a major source of natural gas. Astrophysical forces could never overcome the dominance of the doctrine of dead dinosaurs.
Since then, methane hydrates have proven to be ubiquitous in the places where Gold predicted they would occur. Both the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Interior Department have looked on hydrates as a major potential supply of new natural gas.
The USGS press release last week said its assessment of North Slope Alaska methane hydrates “is the first ever resource estimate of technically recoverable natural gas hydrates, which are naturally occurring, ice-like solids in which water molecules trap natural gas in a cage-like structure known as a clathrate.” USGS said the estimated 85.4 TCF of gas trapped in the North Slope clathrates “accounts for 11.5% of the volume of gas within all other undiscovered, technically recoverable gas resources onshore and in the state waters of the United States.”
In geology-speak, said USGS, “‘technically recoverable’ means the resource can be discovered, developed, and produced using current technology and industry practices.” According to Energy Information Administration data, the U.S. uses about 23 TCF of natural gas annually.
To put the North Slope hydrates estimate in context, the USGS noted that the Wyoming Basin holds some 85 TCF of technically recoverable reserves, the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska (NPRA) holds 73 TCF (not including hydrates), the Western Gulf Basin in Texas holds 71 TCF, and the San Juan Basin in New Mexico and Colorado holds 50 TCF. Conventional resources in Alaska’s North Slope, says the USGS, total about 119 TCF.
According to the USGS, the area assessed for methane hydrate resources runs from the NRPA on the west to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on the east (bumping up against the Canadian border) and from the Brooks Range north to the federally-managed offshore boundary, three miles off the coast of Alaska.
According to an account in the Washington Post, some Alaska environmentalists are critical of the USGS report and the push for development of natural gas hydrates. The newspaper quoted Athan Manuel of the Sierra Club that the technology to capture methane from its ice-like structures “is a very destructive way to extract nature gas.”
This environmental objection, of course, is an assertion, not a statement of fact. USGS said it has not yet assessed the environmental impacts of extracting gas from clathrates, which, the agency told the Post, is “the next step” in its analysis.
The USGS report could boost long-delayed efforts to build a natural gas pipeline from Alaska’s North Slope to the lower 48 states. Congress has authorized a pipeline, and provided some generous subsidies, but squabbling among producers, and doubts about long-term gas prices, has slowed development.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the defeated Republican candidate for vice president, has tried to knock industry heads together in her state to come up with a plan for the pipeline. Despite her campaign claims that she got the pipeline on track, that is not yet the case. She exaggerated her accomplishments, although she did force a change in the stalemate created by her predecessor, former Alaska Gov. and Sen. Frank Murkowski. The pipeline, if it can be built, is at least a decade away from delivering gas, according to most accounts.
It has been said that methane hydrates as an energy source dwarf the combined worldwide oil, coal and conventional natural gas resource base. Perhaps we should be focusing on how an incredibly abundant fuel composed of only one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms could be turned into a low carbon or even zero carbon fuel for the 21st century. Perhaps low carbon natural gas from methane hydrates will offer a more elegant and cost effective solution to the challenges posed by rising world energy demand and the call of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
What is the link you are supposing between hydrates and Gold’s ideas about methane generation?
So what if he predicted large hydrate resources in the 1980s? The Russians predicted in the 1970s.
The methane is gas hydrates is generated biogenically, from the microbial decay of organic matter.
To dennis denuto,
Cite some evidence please, that the Russians predicted methane hydrate resources in the 1970s. I’ve followed this subject pretty closely and I’m not aware of these predictions.
You assert that methane hydrates are biogenic. That’s conventional wisdom. Why should we believe an assertion without evidence?
My point to you exactly. You assert this hydrate assessment validates Gold’s theory with not only no evidence, but not even a tangible link in your argument. Why do you think these things are related?
Dr. Yuri Makogon (now of Texas A&M) recently was awarded a career medal at the Int’l Conf on Gas Hydrates (2008 – Vancouver) for his initial work on gas hydrates in nature. It started in the late 1960s. Trofimuk made the first global assessments (1973 and thereafter). Also Cherskiy and Tsarev (1977), Nesterov and Salmanov (1981). I don’t want to do your research for you. If you want a detailed description of early gas hydrates research, you could look here… I pull this from Milkov’s important 2003 paper. Google it if you want to learn more…
“Makogon (1966) was apparently the first to publish a methodology of estimating hydrate-bound gas in the subsurface, although the first gas hydrate samples were recovered much later (Yefremova and Zizchenko, 1974). Around 20 global estimates of submarine gas hydrate have been published over the last 30 years, the earliest by Trofimuk et al. (1973) and the latest by Milkov et al. (2003). Kvenvolden (1999) analyzed a subset of the global estimates (Table 1) and suggested that 21×1015 m3 of methane (or 10,000 Gt of methane carbon, Kvenvolden and Lorenson, 2001) should be considered as a “consensus value” because some independent estimates (e.g., by Kvenvolden, 1988 and MacDonald, 1990) converge around that value. The value 10,000 Gt of methane carbon is currently used to justify gas hydrate research (e.g., Wood et al., 2002 and Hesse, 2003) and is incorporated into the models of the global organic carbon cycle (Kvenvolden, 2002)…
To learn more about the current thinking among the science community on the dominantly biogenic source of the gas in gas hdyrates, you could begin by reading on pg 551 of the 3rd Edition of “Clathrate Hydrates of Natural Gases” by E.D. Sloan of the Colorado School of Mines.
I think that the ultimate hybrid vehicle of the future should be a combination of both methanol fuel cells and electric batteries (with perhaps an ultracapacitor added as well).
Why? Because of the enormous versatility of fuel sources and would stretch methane hydrate resources even further. Electricity for the batteries can come from a multitude of non-fossil sources: solar, wind, nuclear, and geothermal. The methanol for the fuel cells could come from a multitude of sources as well: biomass crops, recycled garbage and also natural gas chemically converted to methanol.
The fuel cells would give the hybrid unlimited range just like an internal combustion engine, but with far greater efficiency and miles per gallon. But 90% of all miles driven is short range trips that could be supplied by the batteries. Only the remaining 10% of miles driven would be long range trips powered by the methanol fuel cells. This would make even more efficient use of the methanol where very little is consumed.
And the methanol could all be made from methane gas. Having such a methanol fuel cell / battery combination would be the ideal ultimate combination for hybrids, and would extend an already vast methane hydrate supply even further. You could run the transportation sector almost forever this way. This would be a far more efficient use of hydrates for transportation. No sense in wastefully burning-up all the hydrates just because the supply seems endless.